Optical character recognition (OCR) may be used for translating images depicting textual information and documents containing such images into machine-editable text. This machine-editable text may be used, for example, in word processing applications where it may be copied, pasted, or manipulated by a user. Additionally, the machine-editable text may be audibly reproduced through translation to an audio representation of the machine-editable text for the benefit of visually impaired users.
One drawback of OCR engines is that they are processor intensive. Another drawback is that these technologies process each page of the document without regard to whether the page contains a text image that has previously been processed by the OCR engine. As a result, significant processor time is consumed, and multiple different recognitions of the same text image may be produced duplicatively.